lummi island wine tasting sept 17-18 ’21

Posted at September 16, 2021

Current Covid Protocols

The highly contagious Covid Delta variant continues to infect thousands of Americans, including vaccinated people, who may have no symptoms and no awareness if they/we are carriers. Here in Whatcom County, over 90% of residents over 65 (most of our regulars!) have been completely vaccinated so far. Nevertheless, right now Covid cases and hospitalizations in our area are higher than during the previous peak last February.

Because our car ferry will be in drydock for the next three weekends, we will be open for wine tasting and sales Friday and Saturday from 4-6pm. And, because heavy rain is expected, we will return to our indoor tasting format:

 

Friday Bread

Each Friday Island Bakery delivers fresh bread ordered by customer email earlier in the week. Each Sunday offerings for the coming Friday are emailed to the mailing list. Orders must be returned by 5 pm on Tuesday for pickup at the wine shop the following Friday from 4-5:30.

Over the years the bakery has established a rotating list of several dozen breads and pastries from which are selected two different artisan breads and a pastry each week.

If you would like to be on the bread order mailing list, click on the Contact Us link at the top of the page and fill out the form.

This week’s pickup:

Sesame Semolina – Uses a sponge pre-ferment before mixing the final dough, made with semolina and bread flour as well as a soaker of cornmeal, millet and sesame seeds, with a little olive oil to round out the flavor and tenderize the crumb. The finished dough is rolled in more sesame seeds before baking, resulting in a bread with a lot of great flavors – $5/loaf

Black Pepper Walnut- Made with a nice mix of bread flour, fresh milled whole wheat and rye. A fair amount of black pepper and toasted walnuts give this bread great flavor with a distinct peppery bite. Excellent paired with all sorts of meats and cheese…and wine, of course! – $5/loaf

and pastry this week…

Cruffins – A cross between a muffin and croissant developed by the Bakehouse in San Francisco. This version is made with puff pastry instead of croissant dough, for a different kind of Delicious! The pastry is rolled out, spread with sugar, cinnamon and a bit of cardamom before rolling up, sliced, and baked in muffin tins. Makes a delightful, crisp, crunchy, buttery, sugary pastry. – 2/$5

 

Wine of the Week: Bonanza Cabernet Sauvignon      California      $21

Bonanza is an excellent example of a primary difference between Old World and New World wine sensibility. Across Europe, where wine production goes back to Roman times in many places, the history of wine is completely intertwined with regional geography, geology, climate, food, music, and art. They are inseparable elements of regional identity.

In the New World, (North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa to various degrees), the  subcultures of invading Europeans quickly displaced the thousand year old cultural traditions of indigenous Native Americans. In the American melting pot, these cultural fragments have overlapped each other for mere hundreds of years, not the thousands of the Old World.

We can taste the foods of scores of cultures in “American” restaurants. In the five-century old melting pot of the New World, many immigrant traditions coexist in a broad and highly varied cultural landscape in which the economic development interests of profit- oriented capitalism have replaced the long-term resource allocation time horizon of traditional, interdependent cultures with short-term, exploitive profit motivation.

This distinction is exemplified by this week’s Wine of the Week, because it does not come from any particular place. Rather, it is an artifact of widespread transfer of ownership of prime vineyards from family-owned and operated “artisan” wineries to corporate conglomerates which bought these prime vineyard sites and their trademark names from families who have no heir to take on the commitment of running the family winery. You don’t find many fourth and fifth generation winemakers in the New World.

Bonanza is a brand established by Chuck Wagner, whose parents pioneered the elevation of Napa Valley as The Place to grow the best cabernet grapes in the world with their development of the Caymus winery in the early seventies. For many years it has been regarded as perhaps the first “collectible” Napa cab, and its price and value soared. Many, many other families followed suit. Those that started early got by on a lot of hard work, but in recent decades prime vineyards and wineries were bought by conglomerate corporations. While Mr. Wagner grew up in a very successful family estate winery (grew its own grapes), his firm (and others like it) now control enough vineyards across California (and many brand names) that they can blend wines from many different vineyards and different vintages into a consistent wine product from year to year.

On the one hand, Bonanza is a very tasty wine that most of you will enjoy, and it makes a certain economic sense for an entrepreneur to find ways to minimize risk.

Mr. Wagner says on the bottle: “Casting aside the boundaries of individual appellations or vintages, we have greater freedom to make good wine.”  Drop by and see what you think!

 

The Economics of the Heart: Why Trickle-Down Has Never Worked

Here we are eight months into the Biden Administration. The good news is that President Joe Biden is an honest, decent, hard-working, dedicated, and politically experienced man who earns our respect every time he opens his mouth. Over and over he chooses being Real over being Political. He is as politically experienced as it is possible to be, and he has maintained wide respect. He has suffered enormous personal losses and made them resources for empathy when others suffer.

Our nation and the world stand not at a crossroads, but an an Abyss of human making. After a hundred years of unbridled industrial resource consumption powered by fossil fuels and the externalization of the corporate costs of environmental destruction onto the long-term ability of Our Planet to maintain life, we find ourselves within a very few years of crossing a Line of No Return with climate change.

In the entire world, the only human beings who refuse to accept that this is happening are Republicans. They have no interest in resource allocation for the common good, no awareness that their failure to take action will trigger massive Extinction of all life on Earth, not just for a while, but Forever. WTF is Wrong with these people?

Thermodynamics, population, and economics form an interactive System. Everything that happens in one realm has consequences for the other two. Most simply,

— By the way, at some point in the melting of permafrost as the polar regions warm, HUGE amounts of methane will be released from the decaying of the ancient plants and animals frozen in the tundra. The last time this happened (about 50 million years ago) there was only a fraction of the greenhouse gases we already have in our atmosphere.

Now, back to Trickle-down. Republicans have been claiming for the past sixty years that the answer to every problem is cutting taxes so people will have more money to spend as they choose, not as The Government chooses. Republicans have Never meant All people would get the same amount or same percentage. For every Republican President in the last fifty years, the first order of business has been a massive tax cut for the wealthy. The idea is that giving more money to the Investor class will increase investment in infrastructure, innovation, technology…hell, Everyone will be better off!

Sadly, that has Never happened. Rather, because Republicans typically lower federal taxes and at the same time increase federal spending they incur a double deficit. That’s why Bush I lost re-election– he had promised “no new taxes” but in fact raised them (the responsible thing to do, actually) and lost a bunch of his John Birch Society supporters to Ross Perot. And it’s why the end of Bush II’s administration caused a profound recession (no, it really qualified as a Depression) that left millions without homes or jobs. (We aren’t even going to talk about “the former guy,” which was more of the same.

Now we have Republicans in the Senate playing the same card they played against Obama when he had to get the country out of  the Depression they left him.

Charlie Brown expressed our feeling best when he leaned his forehead against a tree, muttering, ” I can’t stand it!”

 

This week’s $5 tasting:

Argiolas Costamolino Vermentino ’18      Italy     $14
Pale golden-tinged straw color; botanical herbs and white stone fruit on the nose and palate, with good length and freshness, finishing clean and medium-long, pairing well with everything from salad to pasta to fish and savory meat dishes.

Perazzeta Sara Rosso ’15     Italy   $12
90% Sangiovese, 10% Ciliegiolo from the Tuscan south; bright and full-bodied with cherry, crisp acidity, and tantalizing earth tones make this pretty wine a winner with savory dishes.

Bonanza Cabernet Sauvignon    California      $21
Opens with scents of currants, dried roses, grape pomace and fresh tilled soil; nose shows notes of smoked meat, along with blueberries and blackberries, vanilla and toast. Silky tannins and striking smoothness.

 

 

Wine Tasting

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